Aurelia Butler

About a third into his story, the hero of “EO” — a small gray donkey — trots into a forest. It’s foreign territory for this charming beast, who once performed in a circus and is accustomed to human companionship. It’s also an important destination for EO, who’s named for the braying sounds he sometimes makes and who is on an astonishing and revelatory odyssey, a voyage that says much about both this one plaintive animal and our deeply unkind world.Directed by the Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski, who wrote the movie with his wife, Ewa Piaskowska, “EO” follows its protagonist — played by six Sardinian donkey look-alikes — on a seemingly familiar and classic path. Stories about animals on journeys, whether far-flung or more metaphoric, have fueled works of fiction from “Black Beauty” to “Bambi” and “Lassie Come-Home.” However splashed in tears, such stories tend to skew upbeat when transposed to the screen (particularly in Hollywood), becoming incredible adventures of animals who brave assorted dangers and cruelties en route to their prescribed happy endings.“EO” follows a different narrative route, starting with its abrupt opener, a disorienting flurry of deeply hued red images of EO and his handler, Kasandra (Sandra Drzymalska), before an audience. It’s unclear what’s happening, but the saturated color, the blasts of ominous music and the alarming image of upturned hooves suggest the worst, a mishap perhaps or maybe just a showstopping trick. Whatever the truth, EO is soon upright and on the move, trotting toward his fate, crossing national borders, traveling in and out of danger and encountering a range of humanity as well as a miscellany of animals both wild and domesticated.For the most part, many of the animals that EO encounters have been tamed, including a threatening junkyard dog (played by the filmmakers’ German shepherd, Bufon) and a camel that, like EO, is removed from the circus early on after protests from animal-rights activists. Afterward, EO is relocated to a farm, where he’s stabled alongside a white stallion whose privileged status doesn’t protect it from human desires and designs. The stallion is carefully, almost tenderly groomed; it’s also restrained and worked. All animals may be equal, to borrow from Orwell, but only because of their instrumental value to humans.EO enters the forest one night after a visit from a drunkenly exuberant Kasandra, who has come to wish him a happy birthday at another farm where he now lives. “May all your dreams come true,” she tells EO, who’s alone in an outside paddock. She gives him a carrot muffin, (cruelly) exhorting him to “be happy,” but soon departs. As the camera holds on EO in medium close-up, he makes a snuffling sound and a deep blare of horns fills the soundtrack, as if heralding a shift in tone. Within seconds, he is running down a road and nearly into a car (it emits a different horn blast), only to veer into a phantasmagoric woodland interlude.The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Best-Actress Battle Royal: A banner crop of leading ladies, including Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett, rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.This sprint from the farm to the road and the woods signals a critical passage for EO, a crossing over from culture to nature. Until this section, EO has always been in the company of people who have controlled every aspect of his existence. They feed and lead him, bridle and hitch him, caress him but also yank his reins and threaten him with a switch. His treatment is as varied as the people he encounters, but whether he is managed by gentle hands or rough, he is always controlled in some fashion. Now, though, as EO plunges unbridled into the world of wild animals, he is, for the first and only time in the movie, genuinely free.With the camera moving in tandem with EO, the score’s tinkly staccato notes echoing his soft clopping, the donkey voyages into a new and alien realm. The dark forest is by turns beguiling and threatening, filled with eerie beauty and evocative of other tales that begin with once upon a time. Right after EO walks into the forest, there’s a cut to a close-up of a frog moving downstream in a shimmering river, which is followed by another shot of a fat spider scurrying up an invisible thread. (The digital cinematography reveals every crystalline detail.) In the next shot, the spider is now near a web, a modest yet critical index of animal sovereignty.“EO” was inspired by Robert Bresson’s 1966 drama “Au Hasard Balthazar,” about the life and tribulations of a donkey and the only film that Skolimowski says has made him weep. The otherworldly, fairy-tale quality of EO’s forest sojourn, though, echoes a sequence in another masterpiece, “The Night of the Hunter” (1955), Charles Laughton’s darkly surreal drama about a murderous preacher hunting two small children. In a lengthy, crucial sequence in that film, the children escape the preacher by river on a rowboat that carries them across a dreamlike landscape populated by some of the very same species that EO encounters.This allusion to “The Night of the Hunter” can be seen as a cineaste tribute, as one great filmmaker nodding at another. I think it also speaks to Skolimowski’s toughness in “EO,” his lack of sentimentality and to the fact that his donkey is finally very different from Balthazar, a creature who Bresson described as “completely holy, and happens to be a donkey.” There is no “and” with EO, who is only and always a donkey and very much in — and of — this world, a world that is filled with mystery, yes, but also of brute reality. It’s not for nothing that at one point in the forest EO passes some old gravestones inscribed in Hebrew, a vision that summons up all the Polish Jews murdered in the Holocaust, including in forests like this.As EO pauses next to one of these graves, there’s a cut to a wolf howling. It’s a beautiful, unthreatening creature because in this movie — as in “The Night of the Hunter,” which references “ravening wolves” in sheep’s clothing — the gravest menace is people. Some seconds after the wolf’s howl (a herald of another tonal and narrative shift), thin beams of green light begin crosshatching the image. A green laser dot skitters across EO’s back, but when gunfire rings out, it’s the wolf that falls. The movie cuts to EO in long shot and then moves in, the camera pausing on his eye before panning down to reveal a dying wolf.Skolimowski often shows EO observing other animals with his huge, unreadable donkey eyes, which are often shown in close-up. In some instances, he and other animals exchange gazes, creating a complicated circuitry of looks that remain rightly enigmatic. Sometimes people and other beings hover around the edges of EO’s periphery as he watches, but in the most potent scenes he alone sees horses galloping, ants scurrying and, in one foreboding scene, pigs piteously squealing in a truck. Part of the movie’s power is that it doesn’t interpret what EO sees, but instead insists that he has a place in the world that’s beyond human understanding.“EO” never indulges in the self-flattering idea that people can ever truly know animals. Instead, whether in the forest or on a farm, EO remains essentially and stubbornly mysterious. He nods his head, including at Kasandra, he quickens his pace, he scampers and grazes, responds and, of course, looks. He’s loved, abused and ignored. Throughout, his gaze betrays nothing, which shouldn’t be misconstrued as an absence. It is instead the unknowable that makes the animal an animal — the thing that makes EO a flesh-and-blood part of a natural order, the thing that humans have consistently tried to bring to heel only to destroy. More

A director cast the beleaguered actor as Franjo Tudjman, the late Croatian leader, whom some call a patriot and others revile as an ethnonationalist zealot.A hagiographic movie about the stiff former leader of a small Balkan country was never going to be a global box-office hit. But its director, a former water polo champion turned darling of right-wing Croatian cinema, found a novel way to generate some buzz: He cast Kevin Spacey as its star.While Hollywood has generally turned its back on Mr. Spacey because of sexual assault accusations against him, purging the 63-year-old from its roster of bankable talent and deleting him from productions already in the works, a new cinematic tribute to a nationalist leader some view as a dangerous bigot puts the “House of Cards” star front and center.The 90-minute film celebrates Croatia’s first president, the late Franjo Tudjman, a leader revered by fans as a Balkan George Washington but reviled by foes as an ethnonationalist zealot. The movie, “Once Upon a Time in Croatia,” goes into general release in Croatia in February and will be screened in other countries, including the United States.The director, Jakov Sedlar, 70, conceded in an interview that in Croatia, many people, particularly the young, do not care much about Mr. Tudjman, a highly divisive authoritarian figure whom the historian Tony Judt described as “one of the more egregiously unattractive” leaders to emerge in the early 1990s from the rubble of Yugoslavia, of which Croatia was formerly a part.Warren Zimmerman, who was the American ambassador to Yugoslavia as the multiethnic country unraveled, warned in a 1992 cable to Washington that Mr. Tudjman’s election as Croatia’s president in May 1990 had brought to power “a narrow-minded, crypto-racist regime” that, in tandem with Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, was unleashing “nationalism, the Balkan killer.”But having Mr. Spacey play Mr. Tudjman, the director said last week in Zagreb, the Croatian capital, “will definitely help” break through a wall of what is at best public indifference and at worst fierce hostility toward the man who led Croatia’s battle for independence.“Ask people whether they have heard of Spacey or Tudjman, they will, of course, say Spacey,” he said. The American actor’s fame, no matter the risk of it curdling into infamy, and undisputed acting talent, Mr. Sedlar added, “will certainly attract people to see my film about Tudjman.”The director declared that Mr. Tudjman, who died in 1999, “was not a nationalist, but a patriot, an absolutely positive personality.” And Mr. Spacey, a two-time Oscar winner and a friend of the director for more than a decade, “is the best of the best actors” and “absolutely innocent,” Mr. Sedlar said.Kevin Spacey on the film set of “Once Upon a Time in Croatia,” by Jakov Sedlar.Karla JuricBoth men, Mr. Sedlar says, have been unjustly maligned: Mr. Spacey by accusers like Anthony Rapp, a fellow actor whose battery claim against the disgraced star was thrown out in October by a New York civil court, and Mr. Tudjman by domestic political rivals and foreign critics angry over his role in the blood-soaked destruction of Yugoslavia.One of seven states that emerged after the collapse of Yugoslavia, Croatia today is a stable democracy of fewer than four million people, a popular tourist destination and a global soccer power.But the struggle to shape the history of the Yugoslav wars, critical to national identity in each of the countries spawned by the violence of the early 1990s, still rages across the region, particularly among filmmakers in Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia, the nations that saw the worst of the fighting.“The history of the war is a constant process of remembering and forgetting,” said Dejan Jovic, a professor at the University of Zagreb. Memory wars, he added, are especially active in cinema. Each side, Mr. Jovic said, “remembers only what it wants and forgets the rest.”Mr. Sedlar’s new film makes little effort to give a full and balanced history. It avoids any mention of crimes committed under Mr. Tudjman’s leadership, like attacks on Bosnian civilians, the ethnic cleansing of Croatia’s once large Serb minority and the destruction of a 16th-century bridge in the Bosnian city of Mostar in 1993. It skips his outreach to extreme nationalists linked during World War II to the Ustashe, a fascist group whose brutality shocked even some German Nazis.But, the director insisted: “This is not propaganda. It is just my view.”Croatia, almost ethnically homogeneous as a result of the 1990s violence that drove out many Serbs and members of other minorities, has mostly moved beyond the narrow ethnonationalism of Mr. Tudjman’s era and become a member of the European Union and NATO. While Mr. Sedlar has been promoting his movie, the government had been focusing on getting the country ready to adopt the euro and to enter the borderless Schengen zone, on Jan. 1.The government, though led by the political party Mr. Tujdman founded, wanted nothing to do with Mr. Sedlar’s film and rebuffed his appeals for funding. The director said he raised the 400,000 euros needed — about $425,000 — from private donors.Mr. Tudjman of Croatia, left, and President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia meeting in Belgrade in 1991.Petar Kujundzic/ReutersHe initially hoped to make a full-scale biopic to mark the centenary of the former Croatian president’s birth. But he settled for a more modest production built around Mr. Spacey’s reciting Mr. Tudjman’s stirring speeches.The director said Mr. Spacey had taken the part out of friendship, and had neither asked for nor received any payment. Mr. Spacey’s lawyer, Jennifer L. Keller, did not respond to a request for comment.Whether playing Mr. Tudjman will help Mr. Spacey in his quest for rehabilitation is another matter. It is not his first acting role since accusations against him surfaced in 2017 — he has appeared as a detective in an Italian feature and as a mysterious henchman in an American thriller — but his role as Mr. Tudjman is perhaps his riskiest.Laura Silber, an author of “Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation,” said she was mystified that anyone would want to be associated with a tribute to the former Croatian leader. She had met him several times while covering the Yugoslav wars as a journalist and found him, she said, to be “repulsive” — an unashamed bigot with a “superiority complex” who “could not control his loathing for Muslims,” the largest ethnic group in neighboring Bosnia.“He was like Dr. Strangelove meets Adolf Hitler,” she recalled.Mr. Tudjman had fought against fascism during World War II, joining Communist partisans opposed to Hitler’s puppet regime. But in the 1990s, he refused to condemn the Ustashe legacy and decreed that independent Croatia should adopt a red-and-white checkerboard coat of arms that had been used by ethnic Croats for centuries but that closely resembles the Ustashe’s symbol.Mr. Sedlar, who served for years as Mr. Tudjman’s cultural attaché in New York, comes across as a calm and reasonable man entirely free of the violent, often racist rhetoric that gave Croatian nationalism such a bad name. But he brooks no criticism of Mr. Tudjman.“Compared with his establishment of an independent Croat nation, all the other stuff is absolutely unimportant,” Mr. Sedlar said, adding, “Without Tudjman, independent Croatia would not exist.”Mr. Sedlar delivering a speech before a screening of his movie in May to mark the centenary of Mr. Tudjman’s birth. Karla JuricVesna Skare-Ozbolt, a fan of the former president who worked in his office as an adviser from 1991 until his death of cancer, insisted that while Mr. Tudjman, a former Communist general in the Yugoslav Army, had some unappealing personality traits, “He deserves a film.”“He is the father of the nation,” she said. “He did a great job.”Mr. Spacey’s performance in the film, which includes archival footage of Mr. Tudjman making wartime speeches in Croatian, consists largely of Mr. Spacey intoning the same speeches in English, walking through government buildings in white-soled sneakers and scribbling in a book.Critics in Croatia have been divided along political lines in their reviews, though even hostile ones have praised Mr. Spacey’s performance.One panned the film as “garbage” but described Mr. Spacey as “basically the best part of the movie,” adding, “He had a difficult task: to recite in English verbal sausages from Tudjman’s better-known speeches and give them a certain passion without any clear context.”Despite his legal victory in New York, Mr. Spacey still faces serious legal troubles in Britain, where he is expected to stand trial this year on charges of sexual assault. He has pleaded not guilty.The jury of history is still out on Mr. Tudjman, and Ms. Silber, the former war correspondent, said it was unlikely to reach a clear verdict any time soon, at least not in Croatia.“He will never be judged by history in Croatia because he delivered their independence,” she said.Julia Jacobs More

Years of addiction and struggle followed his breakout role in “American Beauty.” He lived to tell the tale, and get a major role on TV’s biggest show.It’s not easy being Jamie Dutton.The adopted son of the ruthless rancher John Dutton on Paramount Network’s wildly popular neo-western series “Yellowstone,” Jamie just wanted to be a cowboy. Instead the man who raised him sent him off to law school. He wanted to be governor of Montana, but John stepped over him in humiliating fashion. His sister, Beth, eviscerates him on a regular basis. He has spent four-and-a-half seasons desperate for the paterfamilias’ attention while also hating his guts.Nor is it easy playing Jamie Dutton. Wes Bentley can tell you all about that. Jamie has taken him to some dark places, the kinds of places he knows all too well.“He’s incredibly sad,” the actor said over brunch recently at an outdoor cafe in Los Angeles. “I’ve always dealt with my sadness with things like comedy, or humor, or drugs at one point, or trying to just ignore it and finding another way out of it. But you can’t do that when you’re trying to portray someone’s sadness. You have to let it be there. That’s been the hardest part of it all, and it’s weighed on my life a little bit.”Bentley, 44, makes it clear that he’s not complaining. He’s grateful to be a key part of the most popular drama on television, which had its midseason finale on Sunday amid a fresh batch of potential familial murder plots. More than that, he’s grateful to be alive.And yet, “The regrets are always going to be there,” he added.Most people are likely to have first encountered Bentley as Ricky Fitts, Kevin Spacey’s pot-dealing neighbor in the 1999 film “American Beauty.” He was 21 when the movie debuted, and he seemed like a handsome, soulful young man with a future. But he grew disillusioned with the roles that came his way next — “It was all vampires and underdeveloped young people,” he said — and found himself drifting into addiction. Heroin. Cocaine. Lots of booze. In 2008, he was arrested and pleaded guilty to heroin possession and trying to pass a counterfeit $100 bill. He was falling toward his bottom fast.Bentley (with Thora Birch) found his breakout role early, as the sensitive pot dealer Ricky in the Oscar-winning 1999 film “American Beauty.” Lorey Sebastian/DreamworksHe remembers taking a job on a cheapie Stephen King adaptation, “Dolan’s Cadillac” (2009), and mapping out his next steps: “This is probably my last acting job,” he told himself. “I’m going to be a drug dealer and a D.J.”Around this time he fell in love with the woman who later became his wife, the associate producer and assistant director Jacqui Swedberg. This didn’t get him sober; it rarely works that way. But it made him want to be better and made him realize that he had no control over his life, and that he might just have something to live for.“Before I was like, I’m partying, fine, but I can stop this,” he said. “Now it was like, ‘Man, I can’t stop this, and I really want to.’” A friend in the industry started taking Bentley to 12-step meetings. He liked what he heard. And he saw that a different kind of life was possible.Bentley has been sober since July 5, 2009. Today, with a beard and eyeglasses that accentuate his sharp features, he seems present, forthright and easygoing. He blows off steam playing soccer in a league and hiking. “I have a constant stream of energy,” he said. “That’s what led to my addiction. I needed something to react to that energy.”But Jamie is never far away. It’s the role that really put him on the map, after supporting parts in post-crisis movies like “The Hunger Games” and “Interstellar.” It’s the gig of his life.And sometimes, it hurts like hell.Jamie’s most frequent “Yellowstone” combatant is his sister, Beth, played by the English actress Kelly Reilly. There’s a brute force to their scenes together, emotionally and, in the midseason finale, physically. (Beth knows how to handle herself.) When they were teens, Jamie took Beth to get an abortion, without telling her she was also getting a hysterectomy. She never forgave him. Jamie blames Beth for their mother’s death (as does Beth). She takes every opportunity to emasculate Jamie.Much of the pain Jamie Dutton (Wes Bentley), left, feels as a member of the Dutton clan on “Yellowstone” is inflicted by his sister, Beth (Kelly Reilly).Paramount NetworkAs Reilly said in a recent phone interview, “There’s something about his weakness that appalls her.”It can be exhausting to watch, and to play.“Wes and I have been doing this now together for five years,” Reilly said. “We know each other quite well, and we take care of one another tremendously. We both have to be quite fearless in those scenes. They’re quite ugly sometimes.” When there’s a chance to laugh together between takes, they jump on it.“Then you try to go home without carrying it all into the rest of your day,” she said.But that’s not always easy, especially after living with a character for so long.“I’ve prided myself for most of my career on leaving it at the door, or like an athlete would say, leaving it on the field,” Bentley said. “But Jamie’s sadness permeates my life, even though I’m not sad. I’m very lucky to have a great family and be where I’m at in life, but he’s always there behind me, clawing at that, especially when I’m shooting.”He said his wife sometimes has to point out Jamie’s unwanted presence: “‘You’re letting him come home now,” she tells him. “‘Jamie’s coming home and we don’t want him here.’”This season, however, Jamie’s step has been a bit more lively. The Dutton family’s corporate foes unleashed a barracuda, Sarah Atwood (Dawn Olivieri), to turn Jamie against his family’s interests. It wasn’t hard; Jamie’s resentment had become a volcano waiting to erupt. But ever since Sarah seduced Jamie, and whispered, Lady Macbeth-like, in his ear, Olivieri has noticed a change in the actor as well as the character. Bentley had become more assertive, she said, less likely to apologize for things that aren’t his fault.“I have watched Wes change as a man, even in the short period of time that we’ve worked together,” she said in a recent video call. “It’s really hard as an actor to not absorb the character that you’re playing. You just become that person. When you’re a really good actor, it’s like you almost can’t even help it. And Wes is a really good actor.”Jamie’s sadness has always lived side by side with his capacity for evil. Under duress from Beth, he killed his biological father and, before that, a reporter who got too close to the family’s criminal ways. In the most recent episode, he began to consider the logistics of eliminating John and Beth. Through these developments Bentley has conjured a tricky mix of despair and cold, Machiavellian calculation.“Is Jamie evil?” the “Yellowstone” co-creator Taylor Sheridan wrote in an email. “In a lesser actor’s hands the answer would be easy, but Wes has crafted a vulnerable, honest and emotional character who allows the audience to understand the motivation behind his actions — even if there is no questioning the act itself.”Bentley went through a difficult period of alcohol abuse and drugs in the years after “American Beauty.” He has been sober since 2009.Peter Fisher for The New York TimesThe “Yellowstone” directors rave about Bentley’s commitment, sensitivity and ability to think on his feet. “It’s remarkable, his ability to make you mad at Jamie, make you hate him and have him break your heart at the same time,” Stephen Kay said in a phone interview. “He’s one of one, if you ask me.”Kay made the comparison to another famous fictional son and brother, this one from a different crime family.“That role is so hard, so deceptively tricky,” Kay said. “We’ve been comparing it since Season 1 to Fredo in ‘The Godfather.’ John Cazale is arguably one of the best actors of all time, so if you’re building a show with a Fredo, you better hand the part to somebody who can play.”Christina Alexandra Voros, who directed the midseason finale, marveled at Bentley’s “courage to unravel himself.”“Everyone’s tortured on the show, but Jamie is in particular one of the more tortured characters,” she continued by phone. “He’s also interesting because you never really know if he’s a villain or a hero.”Bentley is more than happy to save his unraveling for the screen. He tried the other way, and he knows he was fortunate to survive.He lived to tell. Now he can take Jamie along for the ride.“I believe in fate, and I believe I went through all that, caused all that, and experienced all that, because I was going to get here,” he said. “There are many things that I regret, but I’m just so happy with my life.” More

When Lydia Tár arrives at the Juilliard School to teach a master class in conducting, we know her about as well as the students do. Like them, we are aware — about 20 minutes into the film that bears her name — of her fame and exalted status. They, of course, live in a fictional world in which her celebrity is established, to the extent that their own professional aspirations are shaped by her example. But now they have a chance to encounter her in person. It doesn’t go well.The Juilliard episode is the fourth extended scene in “Tár.” Like the ones that come before, it presents Lydia, a prominent conductor and composer, in a more-or-less public setting. In due time, we’ll peer in on her private life and ponder its relevance to her work and reputation, but for now we know her as a poised paragon of artistic accomplishment. We’ve watched her converse onstage with the writer Adam Gopnik at The New Yorker Festival, flirt with a fan at a reception and spar over lunch with a colleague who is also an important philanthropic patron. In between these lingered-over moments are snippets of cellphone video with anonymous text commentary. The source and meaning of these words and images are unclear, but they produce a tremor of paranoia. We’re not the only ones watching Lydia.Later, a deceptively edited video of the master class will go viral, contributing to the collapse of Lydia’s career as her abusive and dishonest behavior comes to light. The scene itself, among those who have seen “Tár,” has achieved a similar notoriety. It’s become one of the most talked-about parts of the film. The main conflict — an argument between Lydia and an earnest, anxious student named Max, played by Zethphan Smith-Gneist — seems to crystallize the movie’s interest in a familiar kind of clash, one that invites clichés about cancel culture, identity politics and white privilege.But like everything else in “Tár,” this episode of generational and ideological strife is more complicated than it might seem. And also simpler. Lydia, a one-time protégé of Leonard Bernstein, insists on the power of music to produce states of feeling and modes of experience that can’t easily be reduced to anything else. Todd Field, the director of “Tár,” has similar intuitions about film. He and Cate Blanchett, who as Lydia occupies nearly every frame of this 158-minute film, reverse the usual patterns of text and subtext. It’s not that there’s more to “Tár” than meets the eye and ear, with extra meanings hidden beneath the surface. Everything is right there on the screen and the soundtrack, arranged to confound and complicate your expectations.Lydia’s too. She strolls onto the classroom stage as eight young musicians, conducted by Max, are laying down what Lydia will call the “bed of strings” of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Ro.” Commanding the students’ attention effortlessly, Lydia is comfortable in her own charisma, confident in her opinions and intellect — to the point of hubris, but we don’t know that yet.The first thing she does is establish her dominance, preparing for Max’s thorough humiliation. He’s nervous, smiling, eager to oblige as she asks him why he chose Juilliard and then suggests that it might have been for the “brand.” Her tone is jocular, but her aggression is unmistakable. She ridicules his choice of music — we’ll come back to that — and pleads with him to consider exploring older, more canonical figures. Like Johann Sebastian Bach, for example.That name turns out to be a provocation. Max, who defines himself as a “BIPOC, pangender person,” says that Bach’s reputation for misogyny and his cisgender white male identity make it hard for him to appreciate the composer’s music. At this moment, the script edges toward an easy satire of the young. There are Gen Xers and baby boomers who have encountered — or at least heard stories about — members of succeeding generations who refuse to read the novels of Edith Wharton, see the films of Woody Allen or worship at the altar of Pablo Picasso. Their critique of the canon is often caricatured and misunderstood, and Max may embody the shibboleths of his elders as much as he does the attitude of his peers. His objection to Bach, in any case, serves as bait for the audience and for Lydia.She seizes on it as a teaching moment, and her response is itself a mini-course in the dos and don’ts of contemporary pedagogy. At times, she is bullying and sarcastic, haranguing the class about the fallacies of identity and failing or refusing to read the sensitivities in the room. But she also tries, in good faith, to reach the students where they are. Rather than revert to an argument from authority, browbeating Max with the eternal fact of Bach’s greatness, she invites him to sit next to her at the piano while she demonstrates the complexity and power of his music. In Bach, she says, the question — illustrated by a rising, unresolved musical phrase that replicates the intonation of an asking voice — is always more interesting than the answer.This is true of art in general. The puzzles, paradoxes and mysteries are what keep it alive. A lot of cultural criticism — by which I mean not only the considered responses of professionals but the immediate reactions of viewers — tacks in the opposite direction. We are eager to find an answer, assign a meaning, take a side. This scene seems to be urging us to do just that, to share Lydia’s irritation with Max, so shallow in his certainty and so ill-equipped to defend his position.We might also, in the moment and especially when we look back on it, squirm at Lydia’s self-satisfaction. She treats the master class as an occasion to perform her own brilliance, a temptation that can be fatal to the actual work of teaching, which finally rests on the canceling of ego. The vanity Lydia displays here, which is undeniably seductive, will contribute to her eventual undoing, and we may feel a premonition of that as we watch her pacing and preening, unaware of the puzzlement and indifference in the eyes of her spectators.Really, though, the scene — like the movie — is much weirder than that. It may seem that Field and Blanchett are collaborating in a topical tale of crime and punishment, which the debate about the relevance of Bach’s behavior to his canonical status recapitulates in miniature. Later, we will find Lydia arguing the other side of the question. At lunch in a Berlin restaurant, she reminds a retired maestro that the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once threw a woman down a flight of stairs. Her much older male colleague wonders what that has to do with Schopenhauer’s thought. The argument, as at Juilliard, reaches an impasse.As will any similar argument about Lydia herself, who is a formidably talented artist and also a narcissistic, amoral monster. But neither her greatness nor her awfulness is what is most interesting about her. Shortly after “Tár” opened, The Cut published an amusing, much-mocked article by Brooke LaMantia, who claimed to have watched the movie under the impression that Lydia Tár was a real person. Anthony Lane began his review in The New Yorker with the tongue-in-cheek implication that she just might be. More recently, Dan Kois wrote an essay in Slate suggesting that the last part of the film — the part that chronicles Lydia’s professional and personal undoing — takes place in her head, which is to say in a reality distinct from the literal, social world in which the rest of the movie is set.I don’t really buy that, any more than I believe that anyone really thought there was a real Lydia Tár, but Kois, Lane and LaMantia get at the essential uncanniness of “Tár,” which seems to call into question the nature of reality itself.And that brings us back to the unseen person whose presence is felt in that tense session: Anna Thorvaldsdottir, an actual living Icelandic composer who may have acquired new fame as Lydia Tár’s nemesis. The trashing of Thorvaldsdottir occupies much of the scene. Lydia sneers at her “au courant” trendiness, her “hot” good looks, a score notation that “sounds like René Redzepi’s recipe for reindeer.” A conductor performing her music is like a salesman “selling a car without an engine.” At one point Max meekly notes that Thorvaldsdottir conducted an earlier master class in the same course, and it seems possible that poor Max is an innocent victim in a high-powered music-world beef.Maybe it’s also the case that Lydia is a proxy in a similar war. Maybe Field can’t stand Anna Thorvaldsdottir, or maybe Hildur Gudnadottir, the Icelandic composer who scored “Tar,” feels that way. Iceland is a small country; contemporary classical music is a small world.I won’t speculate further, except to note that Thorvaldsdottir might function as what devotees of a different kind of movie like to call an Easter egg. Adam Gopnik is another, as are Leonard Bernstein and the Juilliard School itself. They appear as tokens, clues, nudges at the viewer who might not be paying the right kind of attention. They all belong to the world outside “Tár” — our world — and their presence inside the movie is more than merely allusive.Lydia Tár exists as if on a folded-over page in that world, where the correct answer to the perennially misunderstood question about the distinction between art and life is written in invisible ink. She’s as real as it gets. More

The biographer and subject of the documentary “Turn Every Page” talks about his loyalty to the Giants and the Knicks, Zooming with classmates and falling under the spell of Captain Hornblower.When the filmmaker Lizzie Gottlieb approached Robert Caro about a documentary on the relationship between him and his editor, Robert Gottlieb, Caro didn’t want to do it. He nonetheless found it insulting when Robert, Lizzie’s father, didn’t want to do it either.That’s just the nature of their relationship.But she persisted. And eventually Caro, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and her father opened their inner sanctum for “Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb,” about the dynamic, contentious half-century collaboration behind “The Power Broker,” the Zoom-bookshelf must-have about the urban planner Robert Moses, and “The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” whose fifth volume Caro has been working on for about a decade.“Why was I reluctant?” Caro, 87, asked in a video call from his orderly West 69th Street office.“We’ve worked out a way of working together,” he said. “It’s two people who are, I suppose, both determined that they stand behind their ideals so firmly that they didn’t want the public to see what that was like.”What indeed. There was the “terrible situation” when Gottlieb, now 91, insisted that 350,000 words be excised from “The Power Broker,” including the chapter that Caro still thinks is about the best he’s written. The quarrels about semicolons that Gottlieb wanted removed and Caro felt should stay, that made Caro wonder, “Why am I doing this?” The editorial comments, so offensive to Caro, that in another age would have warranted a duel.“At the same time, I know that he’s going to support things that maybe nobody else would support,” Caro said, like allowing a three-book series to expand to five and finding him financing through the lean years. “To say that’s invaluable is to slight how wonderful it is to have someone like that behind you.”The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Best-Actress Battle Royal: A banner crop of leading ladies, including Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett, rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.From their initial meeting through their arguments, there was always this: “At the end, we’re both talking about the writing on the same level,” Caro said of the editor he now considers a friend. “That’s the reason I picked him in the first place.”Caro, in writing, expanded on his 10 cultural necessities, which include Trollope, typewriter ribbons and the Knicks. And the Giants. These are edited excerpts.1. The Photograph of the Very Moment My Wife and I Met For reasons too complicated to explain here, a photographer was following me around taking pictures of me at a dance at Princeton in 1956. Ina, whom I had never met, came dancing by with her date. “Let’s take a picture of me with her,” I told the photographer, and cut in on her. The photograph was taken, and it sits on a bookshelf in our apartment to this day. It is a bit cracked and fragile, but it is so precious to me that I am afraid to take it out of its frame so it can be restored.2. My Typewriters I write my books not on a computer but on a Smith Corona Electra 210. They stopped manufacturing them about 30 years ago, but I have accumulated some. You need spares because when a part breaks on the one you’re using, you have to cannibalize the part from another one. When I have a book coming out, and newspaper profiles mention that I use them, people send me their old ones that were stored away years ago. Thanks to this generosity, I had 14 of them three years ago. I’m down to 11 already.3. My Typewriter Ribbons Harder and harder to get. And I like cotton ribbons, not the customary nylon, very heavily inked. That way, the words you’re typing are bolder and blacker. When you’ve typed the same page over many times, the words stop having an impact, and having them bold and black helps.4. My Shack In the woods behind my house on Long Island — maybe 70 yards in — is a 15 by 20 foot garden shed with a high pointed roof. It sits on a foundation of cinder blocks. That is where I write in the summer. The walls and ceiling are bare unpainted wood, and there is nothing in the shed but my desk, a filing cabinet, two little bookshelves, an air-conditioner, and, of course, nailed to one wall, a corkboard. I bought it 23 years ago. When we arrive at the house at the beginning of each summer, I run over to the shack to see if there has been a leak in the roof during the winter, and there never has. Unless there is a special reason, I don’t bring my cellphone there. I pin the pages of my outline to the corkboard, and I’m ready to go. It is my favorite place on earth.5. The New York Giants Despite everything.6. The New York Knicks Despite everything.7. Zoom Sessions With Horace Mann Classmates For some years we did it in person, in a restaurant, but now one of us has moved to another city, so we Zoom. We do it every four or five weeks. We’ve known each other since we were 11 or 12. We’re older now.8. My First Edition of Trollope My publisher, Sonny Mehta, gave this to me as a gift to celebrate the occasion of my having been awarded a Pulitzer Prize. It’s a set of Trollope’s novels called the “Chronicles of Barsetshire.” I love Trollope and particularly those novels, as Sonny knew, and this set is the first collected edition of those works, published in 1887.9. My Bound Volumes of the Captain Hornblower Series When I was a boy, I was in the spell of those seven books. I would take them out of the public library branch at Broadway and 99th Street and sit down on the steps outside and start reading; I couldn’t wait until I got home. One year, Ina got me the perfect present. She had them bound in a naval blue binding with anchors and naval devices in gold on the spines. Every time I glance at my bookshelf and see them, I start remembering favorite scenes, sometimes finding to my surprise that I am reciting the scene, without having opened the book.10. Sundays in Central Park In the afternoons, after work, Ina and I walk in at the 69th Street entrance. Pedaling or jogging along the drive are human beings of every race and color. To the right is the Sheep Meadow, a vast space, really: 15 acres. And on summer Sundays, it seems like every square foot of those acres contains people — families, touch footballers, picnickers, etc., etc. To the left are people in immaculate white outfits. English lawn bowlers. Keep going: roller skaters gyrating gracefully or wildly to disco music. Keep going: seated on a bench, a line of drummers, generally 10 or 11 of them. Their drumming almost hypnotizes me; I can sit there for an hour listening to them. Somehow it drums the tension from writing right out of me. More